Their bodies bounce along the old gravel road. The children laugh as their stomachs turn with the changing elevation along the country roads. Toby and Toby’s sister Juliet, they ride in the bed of the truck and only now; years later will confess what joy was found here. The way the old truck hummed along the pavement of unmarked Missouri counties as Toby scans the lane lines of the road. The sunset or pale blue sky disappearing behind them through the cab window. The wildest country, and the passing over bodies of water filled with fish and fogs and slippery skin. Box turtles sunning their leathery skin and hard shells. Sun, rain snow and every seasons change marked by the trips out of the city. How the sun kissed the city slicker knees and burnt their necks so they were reminded of it when they came back to school in the fall or on Monday. The strange lines of brown and tan peeking out from white catholic school polos and the rough and tumble bramble-born midwestern children who came out of natures womb shrieking with either fear or joy. Pure laughter bounced off the lake-water and pine trees that surround the A-frame home.
Toby feared the A-Frame at first, he feared the world outside the city. The distant country farm so far and strange winding roads and roadside cemeteries. Known only to the dead and passed on. Known to the ancient crumpled things and strange faces; the place reeked of an old troubled history. Civil War battlefields and old burnt out barns that smelled of cedar and dirt and crumpled newspaper now tossed into an ancient stove that sat in the middle of the cabin. It once on a cold winter night, provided warmth and strange shadows of passed Onandaga warriors with their faces painted terrible and fierce. The light danced along the old western wallpaper that was never changed. Grandpa would tell stories about the distant relatives of the children. The dust people, and the meadowlark; the wind talkers and the earth mothers.
The Acadians and the fur trappers and the indigenous inhabitants, the guides and the brave warriors they fought and married. Some exchange of gratitude. Some sick and twisted gift giving where a pelt was shared on a December night and a life or a hairline was so graciously spared. His family had taught him that his ancestors were good and kind to the natives they encountered. They traded with them instead of slaughter. Their men went to battle side by side with the Mowahwk, Chickitaw against the Spanish and the English and the constant grapple with the neighboring tribes. They sat by fires together, loved each other and died next to each other. A tangled story of persecution and fringe existence tethered by a common enemy now sleeping together only a hundred years or so under the dirt. Twenty years later in Albuquerque, New Mexico Toby passes a busker selling turquoise jewelry. With his girlfriend he looks over the selection while the man’s eyes peek out of his leathery face and scan Toby’s. “Prairie Hawk” He says his eyes are like a prairie hawk, dark and deep looking for something, scanning the horizon for survival and never resting. Grandfathers rest finally came and they put him down with a bottle of maple syrup on his chest. From the trees surrounding the farm where he grew up. The wolf cries and the deer scuttle in fresh snow. Toby looks at his father sensing the end of the narration.
“So we are…’Indians’?”
Father nods “Somewhere, down the line; yes. Uncle Arthur found it out years ago but grandpa always talked about it.” The articles of the living chuckle back at the arrival of new dead stacked like newspaper. This is not a world war this is a slaughter. Boys will die in the mud in some country they cannot pronounce so there will be no more kings.
Black obsidian arrowheads, hammered and weathered “Cowboy Killers” a foot below the boys boot. The western themed wallpaper unchanged since 1963 begins to peel at the edges where Palomino mounted bareback Lakota warriors ride off the edge of the page.
The family had stopped coming here, only Toby’s uncle used it as a hunting trip cabin in the fall and all things were left untouched. Unchanged in many aspects and unfamiliar, but warm and welcome. The winters rapped on the old windows and the summers bent and warped the beams of the home so that it was a living thing. It had a language, whispered through the creaking floorboards and dusty shelves of the upstairs. Not for the children to understand but to confuse and disorient. The wilderness maze that was the home and the creaky stairs, the fearsome basement and the distant cabin filled with stag mounts and hides. The glass eyes that stared out into nothing; frozen in fear or momentary bliss of a wild things brought down by uncle and grandfather. Early in the morning the shots of hunters in the near woods reminded the children of what they were part of. The vast estate of Montgomery County was graveyard to shotgun shells and beer cans. The artifacts of the living smile twisted and toothless back at the occasional arrowhead kicked up; as to say look how far we have come. Deep, black opaque stone weathered and hammered out for survival covered by new geologies of plastic and metal forged for fun and pleasure. Their father does not hunt, he doesn’t believe in it. The modern Jurassic of Jerry’s and Terry’s layering new lines of trash and discarded remains of the modern midwestern landscape. On his tenth birthday Toby will trip onto a spent needle, hold it up to the sun at wonder. What reliquary was built here, what mythology is scribbled over the wagon tracks. The ruts of murder and deceit and drug themselves westward after the explosion of the western horizon. This house, the A-Frame portion of it was built in the 1950’s but attached on the grounds was an older house with a cabin from the 1930’s. Grandfather liked it over there, the shed was outback with all of his landscaping equipment where he had once hoped for a farm but the land was thick with old things. Nothing new would grow, nothing new could grow. He would walk around for hours and kick at the ground, why his forefathers had given him this bitch earth. After he came back from the second world war where he had dropped bombs over Germany and sat in frozen glass bubbles this is what he came back to. The army had offered him a job as a translator at the Nuremberg trials, convicting French nazi sympathizers. On the ground he was the only one the French natives could understand, his Quebecois French was better than the local translators but he wanted nothing to do with them. He felt done, used up and tired. Maybe grandpa had seen enough death for his life even though he came from a long line of tough branded farmers and tradesmen; warriors by nature but civilian by demand. When Toby was little he would listen to Grandfather talk in his native tongue with his brothers and sister and cousins. They would talk about the crop, the news and maybe a hockey game or too. This was their shared strange language their own lore and their own narrative.
The shed was dark and full of the past that Toby and his cousins wanted to dig up. Grandfather chose what he remembered and the lineage was broken down over time. He had become more and more “American” and hardly spoke his first language French anymore. After the service he had married a local woman who was farther away from the earth he loved and he grew distant from it. Maybe nothing grew because he had forsaken it, maybe it was the earth mother spiting him for ripping her apart all those years ago. Here lie the discarded graveyard of things that proved more and more useless over the years. The lawnmower parts, the rakes, the wheelbarrows and the masters of lawn maintenance Grandfather swore by. He was raised around Farmalls and John Deere after they got rid of the workhorses and all was changed. Every now and then something would turn up, an old picture or a shovel or Toby’s dads old archery set. Grandfather would stop and stare and hold the thing in his hands.
Remembering, whether he liked it or not the things were alive and the old rust bucket of a helmet Toby found that one summer day had been discarded or set aside. Or maybe Grandpa had it tucked away like some shameful relic. Something not proud or wanting to be forgotten.
There was a time when men died with honor, at places like Little Big Horn or Saginaw Station or maybe Fort Williams, men died defending their homes and families. Now we are shipped off in a giant iron beasts that gloat industry and destruction. A little spangled flag dangles from her cusp like a little feather sticking from a boys crown. This is not how we go into war, this is not how we prepared. We are not dressed accordingly and when we go, we will not be accepted.
Toby runs through the screen door into the living room to find Grandfather smoking a pipe in his chair.
“What have you got there boy?” He chuckles, his eyes are tired and deep as they peer out of the wire-rimmed glasses. “Oh dear me. A real treasure” As he picks up the helmet from the boys hands. Grandpa holds it, firm in his hands and feels its weight. He tosses it back and forth like a rock and dusts off the side of it. “This would have saved your life when you stuck your head up to see what was comin’.”
The articles of the living chuckle back at the arrival of new dead stacked like newspaper.
This is not a “world war” this is a slaughter.
These men know slaughter, they understand it. It has become part of their blood not by choice but by the inflection of the western world. Not fifty years ago they were being rounded up and moved on and made manifest. Ripped from their homes and drug a thousand miles, dying and crying and writing new history along the way. Proud Chiefs, “Running Horse” “Stands With Stone” “Great Mountain” and “Lighting Rod” stripped of names and given strange sounding things they couldn’t say “Smith” “Jones” “Terry” and taught letters and numbers they can’t understand.
Now these boys will die in the mud in some country, with some name in some forest they cannot pronounce in some stretch of a cruel joke. Some distant god laughing back at them, assembling himself of dust and dirt. An effigy not so unfamiliar so it is not always so strange to be re-united with great warriors who have passed before them. Will they recognize them with their new distorted names, will they welcome them? Out of the black emerges a new death machine. Man has united, the world has joined to put down a common threat. The earth screams as she is blown apart and ripped open while these new warriors sit and wait in her bosom for weeks and months. Where is the fighting? When will they come? We sit and wait like mice or scared dogs for an unseen enemy. A gaseous cloud, simmering and intrusive that somehow smells like home in some trick of man now you grab your throat in a true death grip. How the feeling of having the life choked out of how by a godless enemy had become second nature and while the sons of princes and dukes grabbed their throats and their eyes and whatever else they could. Scratching like animals and crawling in mud and rain that seemed to have not stopped for a hundred years. How the boys who had been taught in tiny Kansas schoolhouses their new twisted alphabet and now they struggle to find the words for horror and this new death. Somehow in this new murder cloud “Stands With Fist” is smiling a skeleton smile from an unmarked grave in South Dakota. The ancestors are laughing now. When we were little they told us about the cloud people and the ones who brought the rain and the draught and the great creator. We kind of chuckled, we knew the stories of the old ones were a dying language. It was fun and games when we whooped up and kicked dirt outside the schoolhouse. “Great Brother Red Cloud! See how angry I am! How powerful!” Now they are leaning back in some kind of “I told you so” Grandfather’s chuckle. They always knew they would somehow be right. The wheels that carried the wagons that brought that same unseen death or the ships who carried the sick a thousand years ago, they had seen it all before. The wheels come off and the water dries up and all that is left is the great stories of our ancestors. The angry heavens and the creators and those who try to contain them. There is a lesson here. This is why they told us the same stories until we had learned the new language and only could hear the old one at special times. When the ages picked them off one by one.
Here, in the uncertain mystery is the only place where reason is found. They are like just like some angry gods aren’t they; swirling vengeful, unknowing and unfeeling and ever swift in their justice. How is this a warriors death, and how is there always a man behind everything? When you see brothers toppled over with no enemy in sight it must be the will of the heavens. What else is there but to recite the old dances and prayers and sing to our ancestors. We fight dust with dust. A hundred years of invisible grip and constant shuffling of humanity.
So we pray a warriors prayer.
We pray to our great grandfathers the sky would open up and drown everyone. Even me.
We pray and we sing that that god damn Kaiser Roll foreign king won’t be a fucking king no more.
We pray silent prayers that heavy crown gon’ fall down and crush his head. A raging buffalo bull kicked up in the Nebraska tall grass proud and fierce.
We dance rain dances to wash it all away. So it came. So it never stopped.
It will, all men die in some strange way or some quiet way and here, in some new way. A king is no different from a cowboy. A hundred years from now we are all gonna be some boys faded wallpaper. Dancing by lantern light and fading back into shadow and bedtime.